Generally, all acquisitions are takeovers as legal and tax requirements one firm to take ownership of the other.  There is also a psychological or identity component from who is retained as CEO or has the majority of leadership positions.  Sometimes the legal acquirer ends up being the firm taken over by the target from an organizational identity standpoint.  While who is taken over can vary, it does not change that one firm is ultimately taken over by another.

Thanks you David for your answer. Perhaps i am wrong, but  mergers seem to take place at the end of private negotiations. Conversely take-overs may imply a public contest with an auction process.. Thus the procedure seems not to be  the same..

Greetings. 

Acquisitions are when assets of the acquired company are absorbed by the acquirer and the target company either disappears entirely or remains as a subsidiary of the acquiring firm (depending on the integration approach adopted).

In Mergers the assets of two previously separate firms are combined to establish a new legal entity. The new legal entity is formed and acquires the merging firms by issuing its shares in exchange for the shares of the two merging firms.

Apologies for asking another question but is there such a thing as a true merger of equals?

Mergers of equals are difficult to realize, and do not seem to give very good results (Wulf, 2004). But in mergers the general assembly of the target and acquiring firms  must give a positive answer to the merger. This is not the case in the take-over process.

 From the economic point of view M & A are treated the same way. From the legal point of view are two different operations. In the acquisitions, the acquired firms remain alive. In the processes of mergers, generally follow an acquisition, the company (or companies) is (are) integrated and disappear

Fabrizio,

Here I am focusing on the procedure. How to pay a lower price for the target company, how to acquire the firm faster, how to reduce the risk of deal failure?